SaltShaker

Just a quick note that I forgot to post here the other day (how odd, I did post it to Facebook and Twitter and completely neglected my own blog, what is the world coming to?) – a couple of months ago I spent an intensive foodie day with NatGeo Traveler writer and Moon Guide author Wayne Bernhardson. The magazine issue has just come out (the one with Maui on the cover) and it’s a fun read – even if he missed two of the places we ate it, it still comes across as a whole lot of food! It’s currently available online.

 Huarique: Lugar poco conocido donde se puede comer y beber a bajo precio.”

“Hole-in-the wall”

For many years, until the cuisine, and in particular, the banh mi sandwiches, became all the rage, those in the know in NYC knew that the best of those sandwiches, not to mention amazingly good, home-cooked Vietnamese dishes of other sorts, were to be found at Com Pho Thanh Huong, a true hole-in-the wall located at the back of a gallery of luggage, jewelry and clothing shops on Canal Street. Alas, it is no more. But it remains a fond memory of mine, and came to mind when Henry and I spotted a little place at the back of a galería on Corrientes recently. He stopped in once while out with some friends and insisted I had to come try it, so the other day…

…found us climbing the steps to a weird sort of little balcony restaurant behind some clothing shops and above a cellphone repair service. Somos Peru, Corrientes 2345 (Piso 1º, Local 27), seats about 20-25 people. 99.99999999% of the people, it appears, come in for the lunch menún, a two course pile-on of more than sufficient food:

It starts with the soup, which is unvarying apparently, a vegetable soup thickened with potato and with bits of chicken strewn here and there. Then a choice of one of three main courses that change from day to day or time to time, each a scoop out of a big stewpot of some sort accompanying a goodly amount of rice – makes for quick and easy service.

Henry went for the cau-cau, a mildly spicy stewed tripe and potato dish that is one of his favorites. I’m not a big tripe fan, and so normally don’t like cau-cau, but have to admit, this was actually one of the best tripe dishes I think I’ve tried, anywhere. The menu, sans beverage, costs a whole 15 pesos.

Now, given the setup, it turns out that while they have an a la carte menu, ordering from it is not necessarily a good idea. Not because it isn’t good food, but because nothing’s prepared – literally nothing – but who knew? I ordered the leche de tigre – a new mission that I’m on to find the best one in town, so look for a future post – this is a dish that is offered up in a wide variety of styles – sometimes as simple as a shotglass of the liquid left after making ceviche, i.e., mingled lemon and seafood juices with all the various seasonings, on up to versions like this one that are basically just a very soupy ceviche. This was a meal in itself (and so I asked for my “main course”, a chiccharon de pollo, to be made “to go”), a large bowl filled with mixed fish and chopped calamari, plenty of spicy liquid, and perhaps just a touch too much celery and celery leaf. But overall, really quite good.

For something that in most places that regularly have ceviche pretty much at the ready and can serve up a leche de tigre in about two minutes, the twenty that it took for the cook to cut up fish and make the broth were a bit much (and then we waited almost twenty more before my chiccharon was ready – he had to cut up the kitchen, bread it, fry it… and, of course, the cook didn’t get to it until after making the leche de tigre, along with all the menu plates he was serving up to the rest of the room – it was, however, really good chiccharon when we rewarmed it for dinner). The a la carte items are also a bit pricier – the leche de tigre running 18 pesos on its own and the chiccharon a whopping 35 – although it was more than enough for two of us for dinner, so keep in mind it’s a “share” plate.

Definitely recommended.

 Even when Canadian humour is awful it just lies there being awful in its own fresh way.”

- Robert Thomas Allen, writer

In the tourism industry, it’s a given that Canadian tourists are affable, i.e., they play well with others. And, in general, that’s been my experience. So the question was, what are they like when they don’t have others to play with – that’s to say, we had a decade of them coming for a private dinner… Turns out, they’re still easy going, pleasant, fun to hang around with, if, perhaps, a bit more boisterous than they tend to be when mixing with those from other lands. Well, this group anyway. The menu they left up to us, with just a request that there not be too much in the way of seafood. Other than that, Mush! Ey…

First two courses you’ve seen before: Salade Olivier, now one of our favorite salads, and an Ajoblanco, with green grape halves instead of melon balls.

This is a classic dish from Basilicata in southern Italy, a torta salata di verdure, and one of my absolute favorite dishes from the south – so easy to make. It’s an enclosed pie filled with fresh Italian sausage and lots of fennel, arugula and basil, along with garlic and grated cheese. Brushed with a little olive oil and sprinkled with coarse salt it bakes up into a delicious golden brown treat!

A summertime lamb salad based on a barbecued goat salad that Mario Batali has offered up to the world. Lamb loin marinated in mint, garlic, olive oil, coarse salt and cracked black pepper for about 6 hours, then grilled to between rare and medium rare (or, however you prefer it). Sliced and served atop a salad of radiccheta (a local bitter green similar to mizuna, arugula works well too) dressed with pink grapefruit segments and a mix of the juice and some olive oil, and then topped with a black olive, orange juice and almond tapenade.

And, the coup de grace, a Blackcurrant and Pecan Tartlet. Need I say more? Our new found Canadian friends headed out into the night, well-sated and happy.

 Another factor that renders Peru exceptional: The unusual is commonplace.”

- Fabiola Santiago, Miami Herald

It’s really not news around here, or probably in any hot culinary landscape, Peruvian cuisine, and in particular modern, fusion, or nueva andina, are all the rage. For some time now I’ve been hearing about a hotspot of the genre in Palermo, Francesco, Sinclair 3096, 4878-4496. The reports of both cuisine and service have been extraordinary, but they’ve always come with a caveat. “Expensive doesn’t begin to describe it”, noted a group of visitors from London – and that’s not a city noted for cheap eats in white tablecloth dining spots. So we saved it for a night when we were feeling like splurging – let’s just say that when I was thinking about how much cash to bring, as a precaution I stuck a couple extra hundred peso notes in my pocket – and let’s just say that was a good move.

The room is quite pretty – you enter in a small lounge area with a gleaming bar to one side. One bartender was at the ready, nodding a greeting at us as the maitre d’, a charming young woman who shall figure prominently in the rest of the evening, also greeted us. The other bartender was reading the newspaper, yawning and scratching himself. Across the lounge to the right and we were seated at the first table, in the window – an odd sort of good Siberia – it’s one of two tables completely outside the dining room and as such, it turns out, we found ourselves completely ignored most of the evening by the waitstaff, who didn’t seem to be able to see beyond the archway of the main room; and, on the other hand, they’re the only two tables with a window view looking out onto the neighborhood, certainly more romantic for a quiet date than the rest of them. The main dining room has very high ceilings and walls covered with splashy modern art. There’s a semi-open kitchen towards the back of it and a loft seating area above it that is probably the true Siberia of the restaurant. It was early, only 9 p.m., yet the room was about half full – all Americans and Brits. And, that seemed to be the primary clientele throughout the evening – as the place filled up we heard nothing but English in one form or another from the people passing by, other than one group of mixed Colombians and Americans. I have only one criticism of the ambiance – they use one of those scent machines, which is perched atop a wine cabinet in the lounge and is, at least if you’re in or next to the lounge area, blasting out a vanilla scent that was, at moments, a bit overwhelming.

We were presented with the menu, and sticker shock set in pretty quickly, in fact, Henry offered that he wouldn’t find it amiss if we were to simply get up and go – appetizers kick in in the high 20 peso range and go on up to over 40, and main courses run from the mid-50s to around 80 pesos. We were not given a wine list, though I noted other tables were, and when I asked, our waitress, a tall, rather stiff young woman who spent most of our initial contact with her nose in the air and rolling her eyes, turned on her heel without a word, and returned about five minutes later, simply tossing the list on the table and left again. Service was not looking good.

She returned in a bit, took our food and wine order without so much as a word – we did decide on just two glasses of wine, each of which cost around 20 pesos – since the cheapest bottle on the list was 65 pesos and was one that in most restaurants would sell for about 40 – their markup seems to be about 2-1/2 times retail price, very high for BA – and to add insult to injury, the pour size is about 2-3 ounces, what I’d think of as a tasting pour. After that point, we never had contact with her again, and, in fact, other than the runner who dropped off our food and cleared the plates, we had no other waitstaff contact save one – one of the conceits here is that the water bottles are kept on a sideboard and someone is, presumably, supposed to pour them for you – no one did, and we tried flagging down another waiter to see if he would, and his only comment was, “you’re not my table, I’ll tell your waitress”. I got up, removed the bottles from the sideboard and brought them over and put them on the table. At about that point, the maitre d’ realized something was wrong and came over to ask – I told her our experience so far, she graciously apologized – though to the best I can tell, did nothing about it in terms of the other staff. On to the food:

The food is where Francesco certainly shines, let’s get that out of the way with. The kitchen sends out a basket of warm, mixed breads with some sort of little puree that was tasty (though we never found out what it was, since we had no one to ask), and two bowls of a quite good fish broth to whet the appetite.

Henry ordered his usual favorite at any Peruvian restaurant, a classic ceviche. Absolutely fresh fish, lenguado (sole) in this case, with a great citric and lightly spicy curing broth – we did ask the runner for some fresh chilies and he returned with a small bowl of pureed green chilies that we made ample use of during the evening – but then, we like things spicier than many do. The fresh corn was nice, though we both prefer the little toasted corn kernels, or if it’s fresh corn, on the cob, in our ceviche – but that’s not a criticism, just a preference. This was just plain good, even if it cost as much as the family platter ceviche at Solopescados.

I decided on the maki encebichado – an interesting sashimi roll with fried shrimp, crabmeat and avocado on the inside, wrapped in a slice of white fish that had been cured, ceviche style. The maki itself, along with the wasabi paste, was great. The two sauces did nothing for the dish – one seemed to be a lightly spiced mayonnaise and the other some sort of thick, sweet, sesame and soy dressing. I tasted each and then ignored them – the wasabi and the fresh seafood were more than tasty on their own.

The least expensive entree on the menu is the tacu tacu, and it’s also one of Henry’s favorites, though I think he ordered it because he was worried about how much we were spending. It’s easily the most elegant presentation of the dish we’ve seen – after all, it’s just a rolled over fried cake of leftover rice and beans at its heart. It was drizzled with a very good mildly spicy rocoto sauce and served with sides of dipping sauces, and a little cheese grated over the top. Really delicious.

I lied. We had one other contact with our waitress. That was when, after our appetizers had already been served, she returned to tell me that the lasagna of fresh prawns and artichoke has no artichokes in it, and hasn’t for a couple of months since they went out of season, and did I still want it – umm, no, it was the combination that I was interested in (and why haven’t they changed it on the menu, it’s just slips of computer printed paper slipped into the menu cover?) – I went with my second choice the pez blanco en maracuyá – white fish in passion fruit – she had no idea what fish the white fish was, “most likely either lenguado (sole) or mero (sea bass)”. Whatever.

Okay, here was the one kitchen mis-step – I don’t know if it was some cook’s retaliation for my cancelling the lasagna after they’d already probably started making it, or if it was just lack of attention… The sauce, the rice with its raisins and almonds – delicious. The fish, lenguado as it turned out, cooked to the point where it was dry and chalky, completely inedible, I mean, on the edges you could actually break pieces off and hear it crack. I tried to wave down our waitress, or another waitperson, or even a busboy – to no avail. The maitre d’ spotted my attempts and came over to inquire – I told her the problem, she whisked the plate away, offering to either replace the dish with another of the same if I wanted, or I could change to a different dish – I wanted this, just asked to make sure that the fish wasn’t overcooked. Ten minutes later a fresh plate arrived, though with just a single piece of fish on it, not really any bigger than one of those on the first plate, but, perfectly cooked and juicy. The dish was delicious, it was just more trouble than it was worth, and a bit skimpy, especially compared to the size portions of the other plates we’d had.

We decided against desserts – no idea how they’re priced, but we didn’t want to know. Overall, service – poor; ambiance – beautiful; food – despite the misstep, excellent. But, the price tag for two appetizers, two main courses, two bottles of water, and two glasses of wine – 310 pesos. And, to make clear how bad I felt the service was (and in particular for a restaurant of this caliber and price range), this is only the second time in near five years in BA that I’ve basically stiffed the waiter – I left 320 pesos and probably wouldn’t have left the 10 peso tip except I just didn’t want to have to wait for change.

Would we go back? No. Plain and simple. Too expensive, and the service is a problem. And especially not when there are fusion places around like PozoSanto, Astrid & Gastón, Osaka and others at the same or lower price levels, all of which have not only the good food, but a better attitude.

 It’s common sense to me that you shouldn’t eat most of the chemically treated rubbish most people seem to stuff themselves with.”

- John Lennon

There were the inevitable jokes about us serving beetles, there were questions of whether or not the meal would be vegetarian, since the quartet spent a good part of their careers being so (actually, more towards the end of the joint careers and afterwards), and generally, just a lot of “what are you going to do with strawberries?” As if Strawberry Fields Forever was the only song they’d ever written that could be connected with food. It was our tribute dinner to the last Beatles concert, 41 years after the event (when I planned it, I noted “40″, because I planned it in 2009, not thinking about a few weeks later the year changing – ah well, so be it, had I noted that it was the 41st I likely wouldn’t have picked it as the theme, and we wouldn’t have had the same dinner).

I don’t know, to me it was obvious when I started thinking about the cold appetizer/salad course, Octopus’s Garden… aight? Baby octopi poached in red wine, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves, salt and pepper for about an hour until tender and delicate. Chilled. Tossed with tomatoes and red onions and a lemon-bay vinaigrette.

I seriously considered doing something with onion glass for the song Glass Onion, in fact I even went out and bought some glucose. But in the end, it’s just so… not me. Plus, floating a chip of it on a soup probably would have ended up with a sort of limp, gooey mess. Instead, I simply went with a chilled green onion soup – chopped up the white part and some of the greens of about a dozen green onions, then sauteed them with some chopped celery and potato. When softened, I added water, brought it to a simmer and cooked until the potatoes were done, then pureed it, chilled it, and finished it by blending in some thick yogurt and topping it with reserved chopped onion greens.

I understand that offal is often a love it or hate it affair. Some of it’s based on texture and past experience, but I’d venture to say that most of the “anti-” is based on imagination. We’ve served pretty much every organ meat there is at one dinner or another, and I’ve eaten, to the best of my knowledge, all of them at one time or another in my life – sometimes I like the dish, sometimes I don’t. The anti-heart crowd, I have to assume, is based on emotion rather than experience, in general – after all, the heart is not a gland, it’s a muscle. When cooked, at least properly, it looks like lean meat. And, it pretty much tastes like lean meat. Because, umm, that’s what it is. And our Saturday night crowd had no problem with the idea, certainly not in advance, and even those who looked at the plate with a touch of askance, tried it, and virtually everyone finished the dish – being, by the way, an empanada with a black pepper crust, filled with a confit of beef heart, garlic and greens – the heart having been poached in olive oil with fennel and garlic for about 6 hours – then the whole thing topped with an herb brown butter (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band… oh, you already got that) – an inspiration from Chris Cosentino. Our Friday night crowd, on the other hand, ended up nearly not existing (and in the end we asked the few remaining folk if they could join the Saturday night crowd and we squeezed everyone in) – a party of four asked simply, “are you serving animal heart?” and when I replied in the affirmative, responded with “cancel our reservation immediately.” (And then had the woman who owns the place where they’re staying contact me to ask for a recommendation for a different puertas cerradas that had a menu more to their liking….) A party of three was, to my mind, amusing:

Okay, it doesn’t exactly look like a Yellow Submarine, and I know several people were thinking, sandwich… but it’s a fillet of sole topped with yellow zucchini scales and baked in packets with white wine, butter, salt, pepper and shallots, and served over sauteed Mean Mr. Mustard greens. Actually, purple and greens…

…which, unfortunately, when sauteed, kind of blend together in a muddy sort of brownish color with streaks of green and purple remaining. But they taste good.

Possibly my least favorite Beatles song is Wild Honey Pie, not to be confused with it’s less savage sibling, Honey Pie, which I like. Either way, a wild honey pie is what we have. A basic sweet tart crust filled with a mixture of honey, melted butter, beaten eggs, vanilla and nutmeg. Baked until done, cooled, topped with whipped cream and drizzled with more wild honey.

And not a field strawberry to be seen. Just be happy I didn’t start from I Am the Walrus, Three Cool Cats, and Everyone’s Got Something to Hide but Me and My Monkey…. Now that would have been a difficult dinner to sell.

 This is Jools’ favorite quick Saturday afternoon pasta. Every time I make it, even though it only uses a tiny fraction of my brain and takes a few minutes in the pan, she seems to be really impressed with it, so on that basis, I decided to put it in this book.”

- Jamie Oliver, The Naked Chef

Really, this post has nothing to do with the (in)famous naked chef, and trust me, I don’t spend time in the kitchen sans clothing – just too dangerous when knives are flying and oil is sputtering. This post is about one of my long ago favorite un-pasta dishes, malfatti or gnudi or cnel – that is, nude ravioli.

It’s really about a private dinner this week for a couple of regular Argentine customers and their family, but you’ve seen most of the dishes before – our recent avocado and grapefruit salad with pomegranate molasses dressing, my favorite tomato and gin soup, this time served chilled, the malfatti, rolled chicken breasts stuffed with serrano ham and morcilla, and a passionfruit cheesecake with a chocolate ganache topping.

Back to the malfatti, the new dish in the line-up. Essentially, it is always claimed, these are “nude ravioli”, the filling of a ravioli cooked without the pasta. It’s somewhat true, though with the addition of eggs and flour so that it holds together. Really, it’s a dumpling that happens to be flavored with… well, really, whatever. There’s no one set version of these little fellows, and there are different recipes to be found from north to south in Italy (Tuscany and Lombardy both claim them as home turf “pastas”), not to mention that everyone has a mother, aunt or grandmother who makes the best ones. These are among the simpler ones, and the way I originally learned to make them – the filling a mix of cooked and chopped spinach, sauteed shallots, fresh ricotta that I pressed out as much liquid as I could from, parmesan, eggs, flour, salt, pepper and nutmeg – formed, and not badly I’d say, into flattened balls and boiled until they float. Served them up with a brown butter and mixed herb sauce and between the guests and ourselves, we went through some 14 dozen of these gems.

 Harold: I want 30 sliders, 5 french fries, and 4 large cherry cokes.
Kumar: I want the same except make mine diet cokes.

- from Harold & Kumar go to White Castle

While White Castle may not have invented the hamburger, and in fact that tasty treat’s origins are a matter of some dispute, there are a couple of things that this Wichita, Kansas upstart can be credited with. In 1916, one Walter Anderson, a fry cook at a local spot, invented the first hamburger bun. In 1921, nearly 20 years before Ray Kroc and McDonald’s, he and his co-founders launched the original White Castle, which grew over the years to fewer than 300 locations, most of them east of the Mississippi. In the early days, they were very tightly controlled – they had their own processing facilities, bakeries, etc. – as noted in their official history, the only thing they didn’t do was raise their own cattle and wheat. The early burgers were all made from freshly ground beef and chopped onions, a ball of beef with onions pressed into the top, grilled first on the bottom, then flipped and flattened to that the onions caramelized and imparted flavor to the patty. It wasn’t until the mid-30s that the slyder or slider came into being – when the company was bought out, contracted with Swift to supply frozen pre-shaped patties and dehydrated onions. The cooking process had to change and the unique (and questionable) “steam grilling” process came into being, allowing the onions to rehydrate on the bottom from moment one, and the steam cooking the burger (which later had holes punched through it to facilitate the steam’s passage). One could also credit them for creating the first mini-burgers, the first fast-food chain, and, the now ubiquitous paper hats that every fast food chain seems to have embraced.

So what does this little history lesson have to do with anything? Easy, the introduction of the first mini-burgers to Buenos Aires, in imitation fast-food form – i.e., they’re not fast food, they’re cooked from fresh beef (and other options), to order, in a restaurant, though they’re packaged as if they’re fast food. Sort of.

Enter Be Frika, corner of Junín and French, a mere two blocks from my house, in the space that until recently was a little music cafe called Shemesh, and prior to that, for many years, a local expat hangout called, if I remember right, Blue & Grey Cafe. Despite the restaurant’s Belgian URL for its website, it does not seem to be a local branch of some ubiquitous Belgian chain of mini-burger restaurants. The frika has a couple of possible origins – it is the Danish word for a large meatball, that some say is the precursor to the hamburger, it is also the slang in Dutch and German for a frikandel, a sausage of sorts, or, perhaps, a currywurst plate. The Belgian connection does show up in the fries, which are thick cut, perfectly cooked, and served in a cup – very much the style from one of those Belgian fry places that have popped up all over the U.S. in recent years – one warning, they salt their fries as they come out of the fryer, unlike the local standard of leaving it to the customer to do so.

Opening up your little fast food box reveals two mini-burgers of your choice – in general, a pair of them runs about 20 pesos, and you can have two of the same or mix and match to your heart’s content. Here, the “Frankie & Johnny”, a bacon-cheddar burger with a passable bbq sauce, and the French-styled brie and tomato confit version. One of our first thoughts was, given that the burgers are transported a mere 3-4 meters from kitchen to table, the whole box process seems both a waste of time and the amount of cardboard a huge environmental no-no – turns out that on request they’ll serve your burgers on a plate, no problem. Burgers can also be cooked to order, though the standard, if you don’t specify, is well-done.

Between us we’d ordered four different kinds – the two mentioned above, plus we thought we’d try the veggie burger – tasty, but more grilled veggies on the bun than the burger itself, which was a wafer thin soy patty that did little more than add some crunch – and a “Speddy Gonzalez” [sic], which was purported to have guacamole and Mexican salsa on it – the former showing up as a faint green smear on the bun and the latter being nothing more than chopped tomato and onion – our least favorite of the four burgers. No question our favorite was the bacon-cheddar burger, and both the fries and the unsweetened (!!!) iced tea were absolute winners. Being a mere two blocks from home, and having free wi-fi, they’re likely to become a hangout for my writing days, iced teas at the ready.

 The territory of Ukraine, divided over the centuries, including Galicia, Bukovyna, Carpathian Ruthenia, and Dnieper Ukraine will now become a great united Ukraine. Dreams, for which the best sons of Ukraine fought and died for, have come true.

- translation from the Zluky Act, January 22, 1919

A good percentage of my ancestors are from Belarus, or as I grew up thinking of it, White Russia. The Ukraine is not so far away, and while there are cultural and culinary differences, there are just as many similarities. Of course, celebrating the reunification of the republic, short-lived though it may have been before its incorporation into the USSR a mere 2 years later, is apt – it’s now an independent republic again, following the 1991 dissolution of that ponderous and massive conglomeration of states. As a friend and colleague who came to dinner put it, he couldn’t quite believe he was coming from California to Buenos Aires in order to have Ukrainian food, but there you have it – of course, as usual, I stray from the traditional…. though not too far this time.

Vegetable caviars have little in common with real caviar, other than that they tend to be little mounds of finely chopped, sometimes jewel-like bits of vegetable, usually intensely flavored, and often eaten in hors d’oeuvre sort of form. I made two for the dinner – a charred eggplant mixed with onion, tomato, garlic, parsley, red wine vinegar, and olive oil; and sauteed brown and white mushrooms with shallots, garlic, hot paprika, hazelnuts, parsley and white wine. We served them over homemade rye crisps, which were actually kind of fun to make, I haven’t made crackers at home in years, but good rye ones are hard to find here – these, a simple blend of 2 cups of rye flour, ¼ cup each of bread flour and cornmeal, 6 tablespoons neutral vegetable oil, 2/3 cup water – then rolled out thin, cut into rounds and baked for 40 minutes at 350°F.

For our soup, no photo, it looked pretty much the same as last week’s soup, a beet one, though this version not vegetarian – a slow cooked beef stock and then beets, onions, tomatoes, carrots, green bell pepper, prunes and garlic added to the strained stock, cooked until the vegetables were soft and then pureed and chilled. I decided not to put the dollop of mascarpone on, just a little scattering of herbs across the top.

Let’s call these vareniky pansoti, or pierogi pansoti – I took a classic pierogi filling of mashed potato, some cheese, and egg white, lightly seasoned, and put it into a dill flecked semolina pasta. Instead of a traditional onion sauce I drizzled them with pomegranate molasses and chili oil. Not bad if I do say so.

What’s not to like about Chicken Kiev that can’t be improved upon by making it Duck Kiev? Pounded thin skinned breast of duck wrapped around dill-lemon butter, then breaded with panko crumbs and fried to a golden brown. To accompany, sweet and sour red cabbage stuffed into a blanched leaf of green cabbage and then baked, the ultimate in stuffed cabbages I suppose. A little homemade sour cream to accompany it all on the side and, it was a hit, including with the couple of people who’d warned me that they weren’t duck fans….

And, what turned out to be the star of the show for many of the guests, a raspberry and almond tart, inspired by a traditional cake with the same flavors. I made it following the basic structure of the Engandiner Nusstorte, though without the top crust. The differences, whole almonds instead of walnuts and a pint of raspberries thrown into the mix. Chilled and topped with more fresh raspberries it was decadently delicious!